Want To Give Your Son A Watch? The Watch Snob Explains How To Do It Right

Father-Son Watch

Hi Snob,

I have two sons, 11 and 10, and I plan to give each of them a watch from my modest collection. One of the watches is a 36mm Rolex Datejust (steel with white gold fluted bezel) and the other is a 36mm Rolex Explorer (steel, black dial). No Patek or Vacheron Constantin in our family, unfortunately.

Question No. 1: When is the right time for a father to give his son a nice watch? Is high school too soon? College?

Question No. 2: Is 36mm simply too small a watch for a man to wear these days? It seems to me that most of the watches you recommend are in the 38 to 40mm range.

Well, the right time for a father to give a watch to his son — a good watch — is whenever the boy seems fit to grasp the gravity of the occasion. A boy may be of such precocity as to be fit for a Berthoud marine chronometer at 6, or made of such dense and intractable material as to be incapable of taking delight in a Swatch Sistem 51 at age 50. These are both fine watches for a young man ready to begin shedding the mantle of boyhood and put away childish things, but beware lest in doting on your offspring you give them a weregild as yet beyond the grasp of their character. High school is good.

On the matter of size, 36mm is not only a perfectly respectable watch size, it is the lower bound of the set of sizes that define the perfect men’s watch: 36 to 38mm. This size for watches is defined, one likes to think, by fundamental rules of proportion and harmony far transcending the vagaries of fashion and taste. A larger watch may be allowable, but it must be larger for a reason: the extra room needed for a chronograph to be readable is one. Any other such transgression of these classic proportions is more apt to be a manifestation of tasteless, self-serving egotism than not.

Watch Materials

Hi Snob,

Reboots and space-age materials are two topics you have written of, and in ways so diametrically opposed to another watch maven I admire: Ben Clymer. I think you have it right about most of the companies who are seemingly endlessly rolling out these "new" takes on old "classics." Just another temptation to get us to spend money needlessly.

However, I do not understand why you are so denigrating of the industry's use of silicon, ceramic, titanium, etc. Why shouldn't the brands use these better materials to solve issues of maintenance, anti-magnetism, regulation? Do you honestly believe that Jean-Marc Vacheron, Abraham-Louis Breguet, Antoine Norbert de Patek or Adolph Lange would have refrained from using these materials if they had been available to them, just because the great watchmakers before constructed their pieces without them? I look forward to your defense of your position.

Vacheron, Breguet, Patek and Lange did not work during our time and their attraction to us is not that they were au courant with respect to the latest technical advances of their time, it is that they executed their craft with an ingenuity that took refractory materials (base brass, temperamental steel, rapidly senescent oils) and made them produce refinements in performance unimaginable to less skilled hands.

Perhaps they would have embraced silicon. Who knows. However, your logic is flawed: The real logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is not that they would have embraced silicon, but that they would have embraced quartz — probably radio-controlled quartz — into the bargain. Silicon in mechanical watches would likely have struck them as a laughable half-measure — why prop up a fundamentally obsolete method of telling time when one far more advanced exists?

Your question is a fair one from a certain perspective but misses the point. We don’t love mechanical watchmaking because it is a rapidly evolving, cutting-edge technical field in which ground-breaking innovations come thick and fast, producing paradigm shattering advances in performance with every new discovery. We love mechanical watchmaking because in spite of the difficulty (the immense, absurd, heartbreaking difficulty) in making these simple materials perform well, it can be done. The almost unbelievably refined craft necessary to coax good performance from traditional methods and materials is interesting. Easy solutions are not when things are easy, makers become sloppy, which is a very bad and very boring thing for watchmaking.